Nashville Drone Co Films Sky Hymnal Music Video

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over Nickajack Lake in the early morning, right before the sun clears the ridgeline and the water turns from slate gray to gold. It is the kind of quiet that is hard to describe and even harder to capture on camera. For the new Sky Hymnal release of "Be Thou My Vision," that quiet became the entire point.

Sky Hymnal, the creative project pairing ambient guitar with aerial footage, has released its latest hymn film, and it is the most visually ambitious one yet. The video pairs the beautiful guitar work of Nate Sousa with sweeping drone video cinematography from Nashville Drone Co founder Keith Stancil, filmed across two of Middle Tennessee's most striking landscapes, Nickajack Lake in Marion County and Arrington Vineyards just south of Nashville.

A Hymn Built for the Sky

"Be Thou My Vision" is one of the oldest hymns still in regular use, with roots tracing back over a thousand years to early Irish monastic tradition. Its lyrics ask for a kind of clarity that transcends circumstance, a vision that holds steady no matter what is happening on the ground. That theme made it a natural fit for a project built entirely around perspective.

Sky Hymnal takes familiar hymns, strips them down to instrumental arrangements, and pairs them with drone footage shot specifically to match the tone and pacing of each song. The idea is to give listeners a few minutes of stillness, something rare in a world where most video content is built to grab attention rather than hold it.

For this release, Nate Sousa recorded a slow, patient arrangement of the hymn, letting individual notes ring out rather than rushing through the melody. That pacing gave Stancil something specific to work with behind the controls, footage that needed to breathe at the same rate as the music rather than cut quickly from shot to shot.

Filming Over Nickajack Lake

Nickajack Lake sits along the Tennessee River in Marion County, tucked between the Cumberland Plateau and the Tennessee Valley. It is a reservoir with a long history, formed by the completion of Nickajack Dam in the 1960s, and it remains one of the less crowded lakes in the region, which made it an ideal location for a project built around solitude.

Stancil spent the morning on location, timing flights around sunrise to catch the low, warm light that skims across the water without the harsh shadows midday sun would create. Several of the video's most striking shots come from long, slow passes just above the surface of the lake, close enough that the downwash from the drone rotors occasionally ripples the water in frame, a detail that was not planned but that ended up staying in the final cut because it felt true to the moment. Flying that low and that close to water requires a level of control that does not come from reading a manual. Wind behaves differently over open water than it does over land, and a drone pilot has to read those conditions in real time, adjusting for gusts that can push a small aircraft off its intended line without warning. It is one thing to fly a drone in open air at three hundred feet. It is another to keep a stable, cinematic shot ten feet above the surface of a lake in shifting wind, and that difference is where experience starts to show.

Arrington Vineyards Before Opening

The second location, Arrington Vineyards, offered a completely different set of challenges. Founded in partnership with country music artist Kix Brooks, the vineyard is known for its rolling rows of grapevines and the kind of pastoral scenery that has made it a popular spot for weddings and photography sessions for years. It is also a working property that does not allow drone flights as a matter of routine policy, a rule the vineyard holds to closely given the number of visitors on site most days.

Getting permission required reaching out directly to the vineyard well ahead of the shoot and working out terms that would not interfere with normal operations. The arrangement that came together allowed Stancil to fly during a narrow early morning window, before the gates opened for the day and before any guests were on the grounds. Every shot at Arrington in the finished video was captured in that quiet stretch of early morning, not in the afternoon light many people might assume from the warm tone of the footage. That timing turned out to work in the video's favor. The early sun comes in low and at an angle over the vine rows, throwing long shadows that give the landscape a sense of depth and rhythm, and the empty property meant Stancil could fly the same pass more than once without worrying about people or vehicles moving through frame. Several sequences follow the lines of the vineyard from directly overhead, tracking straight down the rows before rising to reveal the surrounding hills, a shot that takes careful planning to execute smoothly, since any hesitation or jerky movement becomes immediately obvious at that altitude and speed.

Both locations required the kind of pre-flight coordination that a lot of people outside the industry never think about. Nickajack Lake sits within reach of controlled airspace considerations tied to the broader region, and Arrington Vineyards required direct, advance permission from ownership along with a flight window built around the property's hours of operation. Every flight was planned ahead of time and flown under FAA Part 107 certification, with airspace and weather checked before the drone ever left the ground. That groundwork rarely shows up in a finished video, but it is the reason the footage exists at all.

Why This Kind of Work Is Harder Than It Looks

Music videos built around drone footage look effortless when they are done well, and that is exactly the problem. The smoother the final product, the easier it is to forget how much technical planning went into it. Matching camera movement to a piece of music is not the same skill as flying a drone for a real estate listing or a construction site update. It requires an ear for pacing, an understanding of how a slow guitar phrase should be met with a slow, deliberate camera move rather than a quick pan, and the patience to fly the same pass multiple times until the timing feels right rather than just acceptable.

Stancil's background gives him an unusual advantage here. Before starting Nashville Drone Co, he spent over two decades in professional entertainment marketing, working around musicians, producers, and the kind of creative decision making that goes into building something people actually feel rather than just watch. That background is not something every drone operator brings to a music video project, and it shows up in the choices made throughout "Be Thou My Vision," in the shots that were held a beat longer than expected, and in the moments where the camera pulls back rather than pushing in, giving the music room to carry the scene. Combine that with FAA Part 107 certification, hands-on flying experience across dozens of locations throughout Middle Tennessee, and a working knowledge of how to read light, weather, and terrain on the fly, and the result is footage that feels less like a demonstration of drone capability and more like a genuine piece of filmmaking.

What Comes Next for Sky Hymnal

"Be Thou My Vision" adds to a growing library of instrumental hymn films from Sky Hymnal, and it will not be the last. Future releases are already being scouted across other locations in Middle Tennessee and across the country, each one chosen for how well its natural character can match the mood of a particular hymn arrangement.

For musicians, worship leaders, and independent artists in Nashville thinking about what a project like this could look like for their own music, the process behind "Be Thou My Vision" offers a useful blueprint. It starts with a song that has room to breathe, a location that fits its tone, and a drone pilot who understands that the goal is not just capturing beautiful footage, but capturing footage that serves the music rather than competing with it.

Nashville Drone Co works with musicians and production teams across Middle Tennessee on exactly this kind of project, from concept and location scouting through filming and final delivery. Anyone interested in exploring a music video built around aerial cinematography, whether for a hymn, an original song, or an album visual, is welcome to reach out to discuss what is possible.

Watch "Be Thou My Vision" from Sky Hymnal, filmed over Nickajack Lake and Arrington Vineyards, featuring Nate Sousa on guitar and aerial cinematography by Keith Stancil of Nashville Drone Co.

Contact Nashville Drone Co to get your music video project started. info@nashvilledrone.co